Problem and Work Around: Searching for a specific term in Notes, Using Mac High Sierra, Evernote Version 7.1.1 (456642 App Store) Editor: 45.1.5170 (bfe1ee3)
Evernote instructions indicate that when searching for a term, enclosing the text within quotes will return only those notes that have that term.
I followed that rule, but Evernote returned all notes that had any of the words within the term. This behavior replicated on all searches for terms that I tried.
Through a lot of trial and error, I discovered the issue.
I was looking for the term last day . In the search of All Notes, I typed "last day". However, only last day" showed up in the search box. The first quote was not there. And, the search returned all notes with either the word last or day. See Attached.
However, if I entered last day" and then edited the search by adding the leading ", the search term then appeared as "last day" and only 6 of my notes were found, all of which contained only the term I was looking for.
I found that when entering the leading ", it disappeared from the search very quickly. But if I entered the leading quote AND IMMEDIATELY the first letter of the search term, the quote stayed in place. I don't know what the glitch is, but now I know a work around that works for me.